Zofia Chomętowska

Daughter of Bronisława nee Buchowiecka and Count Feliks Drucki-Lubecki. Born in 1902 on the family estate in Porochońsk near Pińsk in the Polesie region. She started photographing with a Kodak box camera, a gift from her father but in 1928 switched to a Leica. She debuted at the Polish General Exhibition in Poznań in 1929, although it’s likely she showed a film there rather than her photography. Most of her preserved work is from the turn of the 1920’s and 30’s, unique documentary material recorded in Pathé Baby 9.5 mm film format.

In 1931, Chomętowska won a Kodak photography competition and started publishing her pictures in magazines and participating in exhibitions. She spent more and more time in Warsaw where, in the mid-1930s, following her divorce from Jakub Chomętowski, she settled down permanently, returning to Polesie only to visit her mother. The relocation to Warsaw also caused a changed in the themes of her photographic work, which increasingly grew from a hobby into a profession. Chomętowska was a prolific and diverse photographer. She opened her own studio in 1937, did advertising photography work, and for a year served as art director of the Kobiety w Pracy [Women at Work] magazine (1938). In 1936, she won an open competition for the position of the Transport Ministry’s staff photographer, subsequently producing a body of work promoting the beauty of Polish culture and countryside to be displayed on trains. At the same time, she remained an active member of the pictorial photography movement, showing her work in group and solo exhibitions, e.g. in Warsaw in 1936 or at Czesław Garliński’s Art Salon in Warsaw in 1939, as well being a member of exclusive bodies such as Fotoklub Polski and vice-president of the Polish Photographic Association. For Warsaw Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a major exhibition initiated by then Mayor Stefan Starzyński and shown in the final months of peace in 1939 at the National Museum, Chomętowska produced a fascinating photographic documentation of Warsaw. In September 1939, fleeing from Polesie ahead of the advancing Soviets, she produced a photographic and textual diary that serves today as a unique document of the time. She spent the war in Warsaw, running a second-hand bookstore. In 1945, she documented the ruined city and its gradual return to life for the Warsaw Reconstruction Bureau, a government agency, creating what would become the core of the photographic part of the famous exhibition, Warsaw Accuses!, shown at the National Museum and then around the world. In 1947, Chomętowska emigrated from Poland, documenting her entire trip through Europe and then to Buenos Aires, where she eventually settled. Her photographic work there became increasingly focused on the family life of her children and grandchildren. She visited Poland in the late 1970s to attend the opening of her solo show at the Warsaw Historical Museum. She died in Argentina in 1991 and is buried at Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.